Three thoughts on #Occupy

I’ve not been to Wall Street. I don’t have to. Though separated from New York by an ocean, half a planet and a different political culture (one in which it is significantly less scandalous to talk about the obvious and total failures of capitalism), I can browse through any number of digital echoes and recordings, each with varying degrees of fidelity and spin. What has been most striking about the media reports from Wall Street is that – if you stripped away the inconsequential affect and incidentals – they really could have been written by anyone with an internet connection.
This leads to the usual overhasty generalisations about the role of the internet and rapid distribution of callouts, data, plans, images, videos, plots, analysis, complaint, trolling and information that attends social movements. The obvious issue here is that these things don’t really transmit ideology, analysis or demand, they simply foreground the ease with which the method can be replicated. This method-as-meme is doubtless linked to the prominence of internet communication between activists and interested onlookers; its proliferation also speaks to a new interconnectedness felt by the disenfranchised, whether in New York, London, Barcelona or Athens. But as DSG point out in that link, the success or failure of a method is if it catches the zeitgeist, if it is passed between and above all replicated by a growing multiplicity of consumers.

I’ve not been to Wall Street. I don’t have to. Though separated from
New York by an ocean, half a planet and a different political culture
(one in which it is significantly less scandalous to talk about the
obvious and total failures of capitalism), I can browse through any
number of digital echoes and recordings, each with varying degrees of
fidelity and spin. What has been most striking about the media reports
from Wall Street is that – if you stripped away the inconsequential
affect and incidentals – they really could have been written by anyone
with an internet connection.

This leads to the usual overhasty generalisations about the role of
the internet and rapid distribution of callouts, data, plans, images,
videos, plots, analysis, complaint, trolling and information that
attends social movements. The obvious issue here is that these things
don’t really transmit ideology, analysis or demand, they simply
foreground the ease with which the method can be replicated. This
method-as-meme is doubtless linked
to the prominence of internet communication between activists and
interested onlookers; its proliferation also speaks to a new
interconnectedness felt by the disenfranchised, whether in New York,
London, Barcelona or Athens. But as DSG point out in that link, the
success or failure of a method is if it catches the zeitgeist, if it is
passed between and above all replicated by a growing multiplicity of consumers.

Let’s lay this out clearly: the internet makes it possible for
images, text and vehicles of ideas to be replicated instantaneously and
without expending raw materials in the replication – i.e., if I were to
give you a manifesto, a poster or a book, I do not need to give away my
copy to do so. Any object is replicable without diminution of the
original. Hence, I can propose #OccupyLondon, #OccupyLSX,
#OccupyTheMoon, and those ideas might be taken up with greater or lesser
intensity within the digital fluxus, depending on how quickly they
strike the desires of others.

But what does it mean to propose #OccupyX? On some level, it’s
clearly an incitement to organisation, i.e., to move from online assent
to physical occupation. It also clearly draws a link between the Wall
Street example and occupations elsewhere, the spirit of Tahrir being the
most obvious example. But the difference between the digital callout
and replication should be obvious: physical manifestation requires the
use of finite physical resources, as well as numerous less quantifiable
factors, such as the goodwill of the state, the tactics of the police,
and the energy or organisation of activists. Those to one side, the
#OccupyX! imperative demands a replication of particular features of its
most prominent American example. These are the most identifiable:

A move in the target of occupation. Unlike in Tahrir or Barcelona,
Wall Street has served to move the focus of occupation from nominally
public spaces to targets intimately linked with international financial
capitalism. While retaining the strategy of placing under contention the
notion that streets and parks are public spaces – hence, let the public
return to them, as they are all we have left – Wall Street adds the
intuition that there are very obvious enemies.

A horizontal organising structure. The inheritance of the anarchist,
anticapitalist and environmentalist movements, the horizontal
organising structure is now taken as the de facto mode of
organisation for popular social movements. The model of the daily
general assembly as authorising body is also taken for granted.

A minimalist programme making no explicit political demands,
preferring to lay emphasis on the function of the ‘new space’, the
meetings and discussions that happen in it, and the physical fact of
occupation as constituting a demand in itself.

A desire for popular generalisation of the occupation. This distinguishes it from encampments designed to bear witness
or shame a space, such as the small line of tents in Parliament Square
in London. Thus we see the increasing involvement of organised labour in
the Wall Street demonstrations, and the gradual massing of people to
the camp.

Minimalism & the 99%

There’s nothing perfect about these hallmarks. I’d obviously choose
the side of the occupiers over any rightwing critique, or indeed the
lunatic feathering of the chains displayed by the moribund American
right. That #OWS has captured the sympathies of many is no doubt due to
the totally moribund state of the American left, and demonstrates just
how tenuous and easily broken the trance of passivity and inaction is
– at least, briefly. But it’s doubtless true that the lack of
articulated political, anticapitalist critique or demand has served to
build this into a movement where many feel welcome.

Why is this happening? What happens when the fact of economic
disparity is so glaringly obvious that it impels action, and yet those
impelled to act are emerging from a totalised system in which
anticapitalist analysis is non-existent, in which alternative models are
held to be either unreal or simply impossible to imagine? Either one’s
reaction is to kiss and feather one’s chains, and laud them as the way
things should be, or it is to ask the question who is responsible?
The question can be answered in two ways, and it depends on whether you
see the current situation as capitalism-gone-wrong or capitalism in its
full and typical operation. If the former, you will seek for those who
have perverted the otherwise perfectly equitable situation, if the
latter you will usually answer along the lines that the action of the
capitalist class is always to exploit the working class.

It is the former, perversely, I am interested in. These are the
people who are responsible for the propagation of the ‘99%’ meme, who
have picked it up and run with it. Claiming, in brief, that the
super-wealthy 1% have accumulated a vastly disproportionate amount of
wealth, and have done so by extorting, legally and less legally, the
rest of society, it is a complaint that demands some kind of redress. It
suggests personal culpability on the part of the 1%. That’s not
something I’d seek to diminish – I don’t believe that the super-wealthy
are any less conscious of the means by which they appropriate their
wealth than the rest of us. But the lure of blaming inequalities on the
agency of the 1% (i.e., proposing a critique centered purely around
their moral culpability) leads to a convenient elision: that capitalism
structures social relations. Capitalism does not have its headquarters
on Wall Street. It is not an ogre that dwells behind the crenellations
of the Bank of England. In other words, the question of work, of wage
and the extraction of value from labour remains crucial.

But these are well-trod criticisms. What interests me is that the
minimal programme of 99%ism – that it is so attractive and so immediate a
rallying cry. No doubt some of this is to do with the liberating
sensation that one doesn’t need a fully fledged theory of political
economy to take part in action. It’s diffuse groups with similarly
minimal programmes that have been peculiarly successful here, too –
especially UKUncut. Like many, I share a disquiet that hesitancy to
voice radical critiques of wage labour and capitalist culture (because
we’re scared of spooking the horses) means that these minimal programmes
will find themselves as acting, essentially, as parliamentary pressure
groups, articulating basically cosmetic and reformist demands. The worst
outcome of 99%ism could well be a response to one of its structuring
logics – that there are some bad people in the 1%, that they have
behaved badly, and that once they’re suitably chastised, we can all go
home and return to normal.

That’s certainly a threat. There are other ways to branch out from
99%ism, to extend its logic more rigorously, to use it as a basis to
insert other conversations – just as here, too, we might suggest that
the actions of UKUncut don’t so much demand a return to the status quo ante
but demonstrate that even that is no longer recoverable. From there, we
might talk about the brief interlude of a postwar social democratic
settlement, the incoming realities of resource scarcity, the way that
demands from and action by workers won what little we have – and how, in
a period of increased precarity and diminished militancy, it’s all
vanishing from under our feet.

The unthought & the margins

Finally, briefly, a touch on two things. One is what you might call
the ‘unthought’ of the Occupy! movement – that accretion of dogmas,
reflexes and given truths that it inherited from the various activist
movements that preceded it. Some of these are good things, doubtless
(trying not to make meetings full of over-talkative windbags, trying to
avoid co-option or recuperation of the movement, trying to ensure people
are not stressed to their wits’ ends) others either lacking or simply
quixotic consequences of subcultural creeds (prioritising meditation
spaces over, say, a crèche) – but they emerge, to a greater or lesser
extent, without much articulation of why they’re necessary, as reflexes.
An example might be the general assembly, which pops up as the base
unit for organisation – but something which can hinder smaller,
autonomous action, can lead to a tyranny less of structurelessness than
blandness, and a paralysis in which a move to the centre, to the less
militant option, is always given priority. These are precisely the
problems of the unthought – without clarity about what a general
assembly is supposed to decide, supposed to be for, what remains within
its purview – it becomes a repository for all of the contentious and
irresolvable conflicts of opinion between those who would like a
movement to speak with a single voice. No movement does that, of course.

The second thing: margins. The Occupy! movement is in many senses
marginal: its recovery of public space as occupied rather than
transitory, its critique from the margins of the city and economy, its
insistence that it is the return of the marginalised, and the marginal
status (student, unemployed, precarious worker) of many of its key
actors. One of the key autocritiques that any political movement should
generate is about marginality – about the way in which activists,
especially, will lock themselves into an ultramarginalised and
ultimately ignored subculture. But it is also true that margins
replicate widely. We already see cracks and fractions emerging in the
discourse of the movement – the tension between, say, anticapitalists and liberals,
between advocates of direct action, or confrontation, and
ultrapacifists, between communists and hippies. To paper them over is a
recipe for disaster. But marginality also configures the protest’s role
to the state – and I think here particularly of Wall Street, and of an
essay by Félix Guattari, of which I am very fond, called ‘The Proliferation of Margins’ [.pdf], in which he writes:

Integrated world capitalism does not aim at a systematic
and generalized repression of the workers, women, youth, minorities… The
means of production on which it rests will indeed call for a
flexibility in relationships of production and in social relations, and a
minimal capacity to adapt to the new forms of sensibility and to the
new types of human relationships which are “mutating” here and there
(i.e. exploitation by advertising of the “discoveries” of the marginals,
relative tolerance with regard to the zones of laissez-faire…) Under these conditions, a semi-tolerated, semi-encouraged, and co-opted protest could well be an intrinsic part of the system.

It is that last sentence which I think should be understood by those
occupying, though it is not simply about physical space, but mental and
intellectual orientation as well. Any space in which the state tolerates
your presence inevitably doesn’t hurt it that much: we saw what
happened when the occupation really did try to take on Wall Street
proper. Indeed, you may become a token brandished by liberal democracy
to prove its plural tolerance of all kinds of dissent – which ‘you
wouldn’t get in Iran’ etc. In these moments, margins are essential. What
are the margins you can push at that make the situation less simple to
predict, that render it more complex? How do you make the conversations
had in Zuccotti park transmit from the outskirts to elsewhere, to those
people you work with or study with who wouldn’t have dreamed of coming
down to the occupation? How do you avoid recuperation? How do you open
up margins everywhere? I don’t pretend to have the answers to these
questions, but I certainly have some ideas. I think we live in times in
which more things are suddenly looking rickety and contingent than
solid, and I think that’s exciting. I’d like to have that conversation,
and I look forward to acting on it. I hope some of you will join me.

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